skeleton, nor this old woman's everlasting tremor, can give me what
I seek."

And then the company departed.

We cannot linger to narrate, in such detail, more circumstances of
these singular festivals, which, in accordance with the founder's
will, continued to be kept with the regularity of an established
institution. In process of time the stewards adopted the custom of
inviting, from far and near, those individuals whose misfortunes
were prominent above other men's, and whose mental and moral
development might, therefore, be supposed to possess a corresponding
interest. The exiled noble of the French Revolution, and the broken
soldier of the Empire, were alike represented at the table. Fallen
monarchs, wandering about the earth, have found places at that
forlorn and miserable feast. The statesman, when his party flung him
off, might, if he chose it, be once more a great man for the space
of a single banquet. Aaron Burr's name appears on the record at a
period when his ruin--the profoundest and most striking, with more
of moral circumstance in it than that of almost any other man--was
complete in his lonely age. Stephen Guard, when his wealth weighed
upon him like a mountain, once sought admittance of his own accord.
It is not probable, however, that these men had any lesson to teach
in the lore of discontent and misery which might not equally well
have been studied in the common walks of life. Illustrious
unfortunates attract a wider sympathy, not because their griefs are
more intense, but because, being set on lofty pedestals, they the
better serve mankind as instances and bywords of calamity.

It concerns our present purpose to say that, at each successive